Transaction Advisory & Restructuring

Regardless of where a clean energy company may be in the deal cycle — from investment thesis development to post-merger integration — FTI Consulting professionals offer comprehensive due diligence advice and hands-on support in evaluating opportunities across the risk/return spectrum. As part of a global consulting firm known for success in high profile, high-stakes transactions, we help our clients maximise value and minimise risk.

Refinancing and Restructuring Lead Advisory

Whether a client’s transaction is a restructuring or refinancing of its existing debt obligations, it requires someone at the centre of the deal, to make it happen. FTI Consulting professionals have functioned as lead adviser in countless clean energy restructuring and refinancing transactions. We start at the very beginning in terms of articulating the transaction rationale and developing the process and timetable, and then leading that process through all phases. Typically, the process has two core stages — a financial due diligence stage, in which identifying and sharing all relevant financial information is identified; and a lead advisory stage, in which we coordinate the client’s efforts to liaise with the shareholders, financing parties (existing and incoming), their lawyers, and their stakeholders. Our goals as lead adviser are ensuring that the process runs smoothly, that the process unfolds on the established timetable, and to extract maximum value for our client.

Technical, Commercial, Financial and Tax Due Diligence

Clean energy companies face transaction opportunities and challenges across the entire risk/return spectrum. Many lack the experience and skills to fully understand or manage the demands of these opportunities. FTI Consulting professionals are well-placed to lead our clients — buyers, sellers and lenders — through an entire transaction life cycle, offering comprehensive financial due diligence advice and hands-on support, including quality of earnings analysis, underlying working capital and net debt profile, forecast sensitivity analysis, and SPA advice. The result is that our clients complete transactions that are sound and sustainable.

Contingency Planning & Insolvency

The ultimate goal of contingency planning for a company in financial distress is value preservation. A well-conceived plan will help company management and directors minimise adverse impacts on the business; act quickly to attempt to avoid creditors unilaterally derailing a turnaround plan; and identify viable plans to avoid insolvency (a credible “Plan B” may be necessary in order to persuade stakeholders to support a “Plan A”). FTI Consulting has a large Insolvency and Distressed Businesses Practice with the resources to provide clean energy companies in financial distress with a comprehensive contingency plan for recovery together with the interim management resource and experience insolvency practitioners to implement the plan.

Crisis Stabilisation

Crisis stabilisation comes into play shortly after a company begins to exhibit liquidity and cash flow problems. Many companies do not have prior experience in this area and FTI Consulting professionals can advise on how create a stable environment — by starting to manage cash flow and working capital, and negotiating waivers and standstills to avoid rushes to recover assets. When the crisis is more immediate — facility closings, employee layoffs, etc. — our crisis stabilisation professionals help clients prepare to communicate with employees, local and regional and national politicians and regulators, the public and the media about what the company is doing, why it is doing it and what effect it will have on restoring the company’s health and stability.

Vendor Assistance

Vendor assistance is essentially M&A support for the seller in the sale of a project or asset. FTI Consulting professionals are well versed in providing vendor assistance services to clients, including helping vendors with presenting consistent and comparable financial information, highlighting key trading trends, assisting with quality of earnings analysis, and challenging forecast assumptions to ensure robustness, before providing such information to potential buyers.

Pre-Transactional Due Diligence

During a merger, acquisition, or divestiture transaction, the value of the right intelligence is particularly high. Clean energy companies need discreet and focused research to provide an objective assessment of the qualitative issues that can often drive the sustainability of a proposed venture. FTI Consulting professionals build a comprehensive picture of relationships and potential problems in order to provide a tailored, independent picture of critical factors affecting a client’s transaction.

Assessment of Buyers’ Universe

An assessment of buyers’ universe exercise provides realistic exit options for a company with distressed businesses, by identifying those parties who would be interested in acquiring the assets. FTI Consulting professionals are well versed in these matters and highly experienced working with renewable private equity investors, distressed debt funds and lenders. To determine the appropriate course of action — i.e., securing new sources of capital or placing the distressed businesses into an insolvency process — we help assess the worth of the distressed business in the current environment, and identify those investors who have potential interest in the assets.